About the Archive
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The Cities and Civilizations Archive is a web-based curricular archive to support the teaching of "Cities and Civilizations: An Introduction to Eurasian Studies," a cross-disciplinary, multi-media course on Eurasian cities. The goal of this team-taught course is to address the pedagogical and scholarly challenges brought to light by the radical transformations of boundaries, allegiances, and identities undergone by the territory of the Former Soviet Union in the past ten years by focusing on cities as the organizing principle for the study of the region. The course follows a chronological trajectory organized around some of the foremost cities of the Eurasian region and into the diaspora (Kiev, Kazan, Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, and Brighton Beach), and is designed to address the city as a site of encounters among, definitions of, and challenges to national, ethnic, and religious identities across the span of recorded history of the region by exposing students to an array of cross-disciplinary materials drawn from history, literature, the fine and applied arts, opera, ballet, film, popular culture, anthropology, sociology, economics, and urban studies.

Rebuilding the Cathedral of Christ the Savior Moscow, 1994-96

This archive aims to maximize the potential of this ambitious project by making available, in a flexible medium, a variety of visual and textual materials relating to the history and culture of Eurasian cities. It is hoped that by storing and organizing these materials on the Internet, the archive will facilitate the process of selecting and organizing the materials for course syllabi, teaching supplements, and student research projects. The project will include hyperlinks to other relevant websites as well as a discussion forum. Since many of the texts included will be in Russian, the archive may also be used to introduce variety and cultural interest into the Russian language classroom.

It is hoped that, as a related benefit, the archive (when complete) will promote skills and facility in using evolving computer technologies among both the faculty and the students who use it. However, we envision the use of these technologies not to replace traditional text sources, but rather to supplement them and, moreover, to encourage students to use books and library resources more aggressively, efficiently, and independently. Thus, while some brief texts--such as speeches, manifestoes, cartoon captions, jokes, poems, song lyrics, librettos, citations from literary works and memoirs--will be included in the archive in tandem with visual images and audio effects, they will be incorporated in such a way as to whet the appetite for further reading. The completed archive will thus include extensive bibliographical references, as well as tips on how to search for further information on a subject in library databases.